Broadening Misinformation Research: The Roles of Evidence Retrievability and Epistemic Bridging

Misinformation can negatively impact individual cognition and societal outcomes, but debates persist regarding its definition and scope. We argue that further theoretical and practical progress requires addressing three key challenges: (1) some claims are inherently difficult to identify as objectively false, (2) researchers and the public may not always share a common epistemology, and (3) each of these creates challenges in developing social consensus about what is and is not misinformation. To this end, we introduce a framework grounded in critical realism, which assumes that a mind-independent reality determines the consequences of (mis)information belief, but that evidence can be partial, contestable, and accessed through different psychological and epistemic lenses. Within this framework, we define evidence retrievability as a time-indexed property of claims and distinguish objective misinformation (claims that contradict reality) from attributional misinformation (claims labeled false within a given epistemology). We then present an agent-based model that assigns agents trust weights over different evidence channels, such that epistemic conflict arises when agents discount others’ evidential standards, and epistemic bridging occurs when they adopt them. Our simulations provide an initial illustration of how objective and attributional misinformation can diverge, and that bridging may produce a socially cohesive but objectively false consensus when evidence retrievability is low. We discuss implications for research and interventions.